


Four Corners

by amyoatmeal



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood, Coda, Episode: s15e09 The Trap, Ficlet, Heavy Angst, M/M, MOC!Cas, Mark of Cain (Supernatural), Pretty fucking bleak my dudes, idk what to tag this, implied suicide, kind of.., what might have been
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:13:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22307728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amyoatmeal/pseuds/amyoatmeal
Summary: A bleak glimpse into what it might have been like if Castiel had bore the Mark of Cain and been buried in that Ma'lak box.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 23
Kudos: 97





	Four Corners

**Author's Note:**

> idk what this is, i wrote it in 20 mins lol. sorry in advance.

Four corners. Six sides. Eight feet of impacted earth and one layer of impenetrable iron separating him from the world. 

Castiel has spent a long time down here. In the Ma'lak box. 

A human might have lost count, as the minutes passed to hours, to days, months, years even, but Castiel wasn't human. He was barely recognizable as his former angelic self before the mark inevitably consumed him, and he’s been able to feel every torturous moment he’s spent lying awake. Trapped. Alone. Every second he fights the insatiable, indelible mark on his flesh and mind. He knew what to expect of course, having bore witness to what it did to Cain, to Dean years ago now, how it changed them into monsters who sought the payment of blood and gore and little else, but feeling it was a separate thing entirely. It was... Well, Castiel still doesn’t know what it was.

Two years, seven months, four days later, that dubious feeling is amplified tenfold. Of course this Ma'lak box idea was his idea just like taking on the mark had been. He’d thought he could withstand it longer without the full spectrum of human urges standing in his way. He’d thought… it doesn’t matter what he thought. Inevitably, his thoughts were taken away from him too as he slipped into madness.

“You need to bury me, Dean,” he'd said to the barn wall in a moment of divine clarity. A state that was calm, rational, and few and far between. Anything, he’d told himself, to keep humanity safe in a world full of monsters. Anything to keep Dean safe.

The sunlight was streaming in from a slit in the window coverings, falling across his cheekbone like a wound. His breathing was wet and ragged. Fell to his knees and surrounded by exsanguinating corpses; mostly monster, but an unforgivable number human. That was how Dean had stumbled upon him. It was a simple hunt. A vampire nest east of Omaha. For all intents and purposes, a simple milk run, but even Castiel had underestimated how deeply the claws of the mark had dug deeper into his essence. The mark didn’t discriminate. And blood... was blood. 

“Cas?” Dean had lowered his blade, soles of his boots crunching against the wet straw strewn about the sea of blood on the barn floor. He sounded disbelieving, hesitant. In all truth, he sounded frightened. He approached from behind with a healthy dose of caution that if Castiel hadn’t been the monster he’d become he might’ve even had the gall to be offended. 

But he was a monster. In fact, he still is. 

“When I can't fight it anymore,” Castiel continued with a wet gulp, chest heaving in strained bursts, eyes glazed over from seeing red, “You need to put me in the ground.”

“Hey, Cas, look at me.” Suddenly, Dean was there, calloused hands cradling his filthy face, crowding his vision, forcing Castiel to refocus on the man crouching within a foot of his life. When their eyes locked, he had the decency to strain a weak, pitying smile. “We’ll find another way. Like we always do. We’ll turn over a few rocks--”

Dean’s voice was droning and incessant. Desperate. Even then, staring into those green eyes, the depths of Dean’s soul, the man he could admit now on pain of never ending death that he loved, that he vowed to protect till the very ends of the Earth and the next, Castiel could honestly say in that moment he'd wanted to tear him apart. Rip him limb from damnable limb. Explore him from the inside out. 

That was how he knew and he knew it to be true. “There is no other way.” 

And despite everything, Dean knew it too. Salty tears welled up along the red rims of his eyes, threatening to pour over. “Cas, I can't--” he started, voice broken from years of abuse. “You can't ask me to do that. I won't lose you too.”

They’d already lost everyone they’d known. Everyone they’d cared about. Everyone they’d loved. It was a cruel thing to ask, but then again, when hadn’t their lives been full of needlessly cruel things? 

“You have to. No matter how much I fight it I can't hold it off forever and you know as well as anyone that we don’t have forever.” Castiel surveyed the slew of bodies surrounding them in heaps and Dean’s eyes followed with reticence. Castiel couldn’t look at the carnage anymore. Couldn’t listen to Dean’s still coursing blood in his veins. He pinched his eyes shut and breathed in a shaky, pained breath. “I’m already losing myself to it.” 

“No,” Dean protested weakly, unwilling or unable to accept the hard truths of the harsh reality they’d found themselves in. “No! You just need to fight harder--”

“Dean, you need to promise me,” Castiel growled over him, “when the time comes, you'll be the one to do it.”

Castiel has replayed this conversation in his head an infinite number of times. 

Even after, Dean still prayed. Begged forgiveness from the one pillar of divinity he had any trace of faith in because God had been dead just as long as Castiel had been buried in this eternal resting place. Desperate ramblings from a guilty man. But Dean wasn't guilty. Not for this. 

And yet he prayed.

“Sammy and I, we, uh, we went on a hunt, whatever that looks like these days,” he’d gone on to say, voice thin and quivering. “Werewolf pack in Detroit. There were lots of ‘em. Too many. We took out as many as we could but- Fuck-” He sucked in a sharp breath and wrung it out and choked on the words stuck in his throat until he finally coughed it up. “Sammy, he, uh, he didn't make it.” Dean dissolved into tears. “I kept tellin’ him he had one foot in the grave. For years, I’d been tellin’ him. It's like he wanted it, y’know? Fucked up part is, I can't even blame him.” 

The space between that prayer and the last felt like centuries, but in reality, had been less than a month later. Three weeks, two days, seven hours. With no inkling of pretense or deliberation, it came swiftly and sat heavy on Castiel’s chest.

“Cas -- it's been a while,” he’d said one day, like it was a phone conversation amongst friends catching up, not the inevitable end. “I'm sorry I never told you before things went south. I'm sorry I never told you when things were good either. Just... I gotta say it cuz I don't know how much time I got, but,” He swallowed, collecting himself, “I love you, Cas.” He sucked in a sharp, watery breath, and released a soul-wracking sob. “I needed you to know that before I do something stupid on purpose. Cuz this world… Without you, without Sammy… Well, it ain’t got much left for me, does it? And I just- I needed you to know, in case this is the last chance I get to say anything. I know it's selfish, but it's what I deserve. Just remember that for me? Please?” 

And then Castiel was left in the dark, that pull towards Dean slicing through the fat for just one last singular moment of clarity. “I love you too,” he murmured past dry chapped lips, but it fell upon deaf ears. 

He could feel Dean dying just as viscerally as he felt his old human soul burning away. That part of him he’d burned into him the day he rescued him from the clutches of Hell. He'd always expected this day to come despite all his efforts in his time on earth to mitigate and prolong this one insignificant form of life. Afterall, Dean was human. But that was before… this. A lifetime spent utterly and truly alone.

Now he lay here in the ground, for not even he knows how long, and sometimes if he quiets the darkness in his mind he can still hear Dean’s voice echoing off four corners, six sides, digging through eight feet of impacted earth, and cracking open one layer of impenetrable iron, waiting for the day he can finally see the light.


End file.
